Life and Death in Picasso

Green’s deep knowledge and clear prose make him a fine guide, and the works illustrated in this handsomely produced volume are among the most intriguing and powerfully articulated in Picasso’s entire career’ – The Art Newspaper

‘Green’s careful observation and clear reasoning illuminate work from Museu Picasso, Barcelona … an adept introduction to aspects of animation, doubling and ‘rhyming’ in Picasso’s art’ – The Art Book

In this groundbreaking new study of the leading artist of the twentieth century, Christopher Green explores Picasso's fascination with ideas about the living and the dead. He shows how Picasso oscillated between the animate and the inanimate, creating objects that 'live' and figures that are 'dead' as objects.

Covering the period from the creation of the Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to the artist's association with the Surrealists in the 1930s, the book offers a journey through Picasso's imagination and reveals – by way of Freud, André Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire, among thers – the ideas and reflections associated with life and death in his work.

Published in association with the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the book also includes an essay on Picasso's biomorphic motifs by the leading Spanish critic J.F. Yvars.

Christopher Green, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, is an international authority on French art of the early twentieth century. His previous books include Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo.